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Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

Healthcare organizations face unique network access challenges. While some industries only need to control access by professional employees and partners, healthcare organizations are increasingly opening up data to consumers, and the number of consumer access points are multiplying. While other industries face similar problems – banking seems particularly relevant – I don’t know of any other industry that depends on such a sophisticated data exchange with consumers to achieve critical results.

Given the industry’s security issues, I found the following article to be quite interesting. While it doesn’t address healthcare concerns directly, I think it’s relevant nonetheless.

The article, written by InfoArmor CTO Christian Lees, contends that next-generation credentials are “edging toward a precarious place.” He argues that because IT workers are under great pressure to produce, they’re rushing the credentialing process. And that has led to a lack of attention to detail, he says:

“Employees, contractors and even vendors are rapidly credentialed with little attention given to security rules such as limiting access per job roles, enforcing secure passwords, and immediately revoking credentials after an employee moves on…[and as a result], criminals get to choose from a smorgasbord of credentialed identities with which to phish employees and even top executives.”

Meanwhile, if auto-generated passwords are short and ineffective, or so long that users must write them down to remember them, credentials tend to get compromised quickly. What’s more, password sharing and security shortcuts used for sign-in (such as storing a password in a browser) pose further risk, he notes.

Though he doesn’t state this in exactly these words, the problem is obviously multiplied when you’re a healthcare provider. After all, if you’re managing not only thousands of employee and partner credentials, but potentially, millions of consumer credentials for use in accessing portal data, you’re fighting a battle on many fronts.

And unfortunately, the cost of losing control of these credentials is very high. In fact, according to a Verizon study, 63% of confirmed data breaches happening last year involved weak, default or stolen passwords.

To tackle this problem, Lees suggests, organizations should create a work process which handles different types of credentials in different ways.

If you’re providing access to public-facing information, which doesn’t include transaction, identifying or sensitive information, using a standard password may be good enough. The passwords should still be encrypted and protected, but they should still be easy to use, he says.

Meanwhile, if you need to offer users access to highly sensitive information, your IT organization should implement a separate process which assigns stronger, more complex passwords as well as security layers like biometrics, cryptographic keys or out-of-band confirmation codes, Lees recommends.

Another way to improve your credentialing strategy is to associate known behaviors with those credentials. “If you know that Bill comes to the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays but works remotely the rest of the week and that he routinely accesses certain types of files, it becomes much harder for a criminal to use Bill’s compromised credentials undetected,” he writes.

Of course, readers of this blog will have their own strategies in placefor protecting credentials, but Lee’s suggestions are worth considering as well. When you’re dealing with valuable health data, it never hurts to go that extra mile. If you don’t, you might get a visit by the HIPAA police (proverbial, not actual).

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